


Woodworking

by citrusfriend



Series: Poetry [23]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Choosing to Live, Cissexism, Fear of Death, Gen, Hate Crimes, Hope, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Murder, Poetry, Recovery, Self-Acceptance, Self-Love, Slam Poetry, Suicidal Thoughts, Therapy, Trans Character, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character, Transmisogyny, Transphobia, no actual assault just fear of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:01:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25824811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citrusfriend/pseuds/citrusfriend
Summary: Sometimes I wonder if I became suicidal in self-defense;like if I could hope for death hard enough,I could trick myself into thinkingthere was nothing that they could take away from me.
Series: Poetry [23]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1320233
Kudos: 1





	Woodworking

When I told the therapist at the psych ward  
that I was afraid that everytime I left the house,  
I was walking to my death,  
that my transness was a gang plank  
and the citizens of small towns crowded behind me,  
she told me that trans women are murdered more often than trans men.  
I wish I had asked for a different therapist.   
Instead, I shrunk and never spoke of it again.  
I wish I had told her that trans women dying  
would not prevent me from _dying with them._  
Instead, I only spoke in monosyllables.  
I wish I had told her that trans women belong in conversations about trans people,  
about hate crimes and transmisogyny   
because god knows they are excluded enough,  
but this was not one of those conversations.

This was a plea for _help,_  
a lamentation  
about how everytime I leave the house,  
I wonder if I will make it back alive,  
if I will make it back un-assaulted,  
if I will want to make it back at all.  
I told them I felt like I was walking the plank  
and they told me to think about a sinking ship,  
as if it would give me a life preserver.

Sometimes I wonder if I became suicidal in self-defense;  
like if I could hope for death hard enough,  
I could trick myself into thinking  
there was nothing that they could take away from me.  
Other times, I think that I became suicidal as a reclamation;  
no one can take this body away from me again  
if I leave it first.  
I cannot be tied to the mast in sacrifice to the storm  
if I am already slaughtered.

Sometimes I think that I wasn't truly suicidal at all.  
They called it suicidal ideation when they should have called it grief,  
should have called me mourning.  
After all, what does death matter to one who was raised for it?

I offered them a written anthology on my terror  
and they told me to read other people's eulogies  
as if would stop anyone from needing to write my own.  
So I stopped writing anything.  
I grew tired of my woodworking giving me nothing but pages.  
Flimsy things they use to wipe away their guilt.

Instead I tore the wood from the gang plank and built myself a stage.  
If they want so desperately to set me apart,  
to see me as other,  
then I will not give them the _privilege_ of pretending  
we are on the same level.  
I will tear apart this vessel,  
this barely sea-worthy ship,  
and I will carve it into a masterpiece,  
a home, a body  
that they cannot take from me.

I hold hand-crafted _hope_ in my hands.  
I built it myself.  
I cradle it in my palms and build it a nest  
of passion and love and fury.  
Sometimes I wonder if things would have been different  
if anyone had taught me wood-working,  
if I had ever seen someone else craft.  
I have learned how to do it myself, of course,  
but sometimes I wonder.  
Instead, I stand on a wooden stage  
on a wooden ship  
and I hold hand-crafted hope in my hands  
as a compass.  
Above me, dead trans women light the night sky  
and I cry my thanks for their guidance into the night.  
My crew is every trans person still alive, still building,  
and our kin above teach us how to navigate across the seas.

Nonetheless, this ship I built myself, with no guidance, no teacher.  
I built this ship, this life, this hope myself,  
built it out of the piss-poor pieces  
of pity they proffered to placate me,  
and the wood that I cut myself.  
I built this myself.  
I built _all of this_ myself.

**Author's Note:**

> 8/9/2020


End file.
